john m. kennedy - a psychology of picture perception

8/12/2019 John M. Kennedy - A Psychology of Picture Perception

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A Psychology

of Picture

Perception

Images and Information


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John M Kennedy A PSYCHOLOGY

OF PICTUREPERCEPTION

Jossey-Bass PublishersSan Francisco. Washington. London. 1974


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The Jossey-BassBehavioral Science Series

Special Advisors

WILLLIAM E. HENRY

University of Chicago

NEVITT SANFORD WrightInstitute, Berkeley

A PSYCHOLOGY OF PICTURE PERCEPTION

Images and Informationby John M. Kennedy

Copyright (c) 1974 by: Jossey-Bass, Inc., Publishers615 Montgomery Street

San Francisco, California 94:111

&

Jossey-Bass Limited3 Henrietta StreetLondon WC2E SLU

Copyright under International, Pan American, and

Universal Copyright Conventions. All rights

reserved. No part of this book may be reproducedin any form--except for brief quotation (not to exceed 1,000words) in a review or professional work--without permissionin writing from the publishers.

Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number LC 72-5892

International Standard Book Number ISBN 0-87589-204:-3

Manufactured in the United States of America

JACKET DESIGN BY WILLI MUM

FIRST EDITION

Code 7343


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Preface

Some fields of research in psy-

chology burst into prominence with a single study. Others

congregate in the wings for some time before it becomes clear that

something quite sizeable has been taking place. A psychology of

pictures and perception has been gathering in that latter fashion. Thestudy of pictures is one of those disciplines that brought puzzles to

aesthetics and philosophy long before it was realized that research

psychology had much to. contribute, and it is only very recently that

psychologists have confidently set about applying their ideas and

methods to pictures. Over the last few years child psychology,

cross-cultural psychology, perception psychology, and animal

psychology have all added their theories and findings. It is time to

bring the pieces together, to display the wealth of procedure and

result, the implications for the development of perceptual skills, and

the conclusions to be drawn about the perceptual abilities of adults

in different cultures.

The plan of my discussion is as follows. The first or

introductory chapter describes the kinds of puzzles I will

investigate, the .kinds of everyday pictures and recognition skills

that are universal and obvious, and yet mysterious too. I will suggest

that a clear, simple, readily understandable picture may tell us as

much about perception as an apple falling tells us about physics.

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Preface xii

example to me, and if some of this book--whose writing began as e

was born--is as charming as Robert it will be all worth while on that

count alone.

Thanks are due to Pat Everingham for typing the manuscript,

and to The Graphics Department, Scarborough College, Toronto--

especially Ken Fong--for patient and thoughtful assistance with the

illustrations.

I have been aided by a U.S. Navy grant to J. J. Gibson, the

Milton Fund, Harvard, and a Spencer Fund Grant, Harvard, the

Harvard Faculty Small Grants Program, and a grant from the

Department of Psychology, Toronto. Project Zero, Harvard, of

which I was a member, has been funded by the National Science

Foundation and the Department of Health Education and Welfare.Some of the research reported in this work was nominated by Cor-

nell for an American Institutes for Research Award, and was a

finalist in that competition. I must thank both Cornell and the In-

stitute for this consideration. The American Psychological Associa-

tion granted me a Young Psychologists Award, in 1972, for which I

am very grateful. It gave me the opportunity to visit Japan and the

International Congress of Psychology in Tokyo in 1972, to talk

about my work. I was given a most hospitable reception by myJapanese hosts, and I learned a great deal in talks with Kaoru

Noguchi, especially, and Yoshiaki Nakajima. I have also been

granted a N.A.T.O. Lectureship to visit Scotland, Ireland, Denmark,

and Italy, to talk about my work and meet with colleagues engaged

in related work. I must thank N.A.T.O. and say that I am eagerly

expecting to learn a good deal. The Epilogue to this book closes on a

note of research-to-come. Perhaps as my contacts in Europe and

Japan come to influence my ideas, all of those plans will change inrevealing ways. I hope so.

Toronto JOHN M. KENNEDY

September 1973

Contents

Preface ix

1. Pictures as Information 1

2. Light as Information 14

3. Four Theories of Pictures 28

4. Deception and Development of Picture Perception 47

5. Picture Perception Across Cultures and Species 65

6. Figure and Ground 85

7. The Scope of Outline Pictures 106

8. Using the Language of Lines 134

Epilogue 156

References 161

Index 169

xiii


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A Psychology

of Picture

Perception

Images and Information


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Chapter One

Pictures as

Information

As a means of communicating,

pictures are as old as history, for they were among the first record-

ing devices ever used. Pictures have been as common as the wheel

and fire in past cultures, and today they are more common than

ever: in magazines, textbooks, and albums, outdoors as signs, and in

our homes as entertainment. As coins are to economics, pictures are

to communication.

What enables a picture to communicate, to give us informa-tion? Do we recognize only pictures from our own culture? In the

profusion of photographs and drawings in magazines, we may see

pictures from the Stone Age alongside pictures from the twentieth

century, or pictures from other countries whose languages are be-

yond our imitation because their roots are so different from our

own. How do we react to a picture from an alien culture-say, a

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46 A Psychology of Picture Perception

[the observer] is confronted with a likeness...he will realize that what

he beholds is only one among an indefinite number of other

likenesses that could be made of this one theme" (p.127).

Bernheimer does not say by what means pictures reveal

properties that would be evident in other views. But his claims sug-

gest a concept of information supplied by optic structure, present in

a frozen moment, invariant across changes in the normal

environment.

Bernheimer, a philosopher, describes some of the effects of

looking at static pictures. Gibson suggests the kinds of physical

things that a picture depends on for its effects. In the last resort,Gibson can suggest only a very general definition. The range and

variety of pictures and the complexity of light and its patterns de-

feats any contemporary attempt to arrive at more than a general

definition. Since we cannot be explicit, the attempt to refute the

"pictures are conventions" view has not completely succeeded. To-

day, geometry, optics, and logic cannot completely defeat that view.

Can research and experiments? The next chapters review the

evidence.


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Chapter Four

Deception and

Development of

Picture Perception

Man invented pictures and turned

them to many ends. By now his invention has as many forms as

functions: doodles, cartoons, sketches, paintings, photographs,stained-glass windows. The torrent of images in our culture pours

on us from every possible comer, for every possible reason: to

propagandize, identify, give pleasure, comfort, and remind. We are

amused, puzzled, and informed by pictures. Pictures stimulate imag-

ination; we tell stories around photographs. We use pictures in

books to attract the reader's attention, to inform him about the

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for example, "that's a pear," even though the shaky outline of a pear

is all but buried in a mass of lines.

An interesting theory has been offered by Sakuichi Naka-

gawa (personal communication 1972) about the development ofchildren's perceptions. He argues that children begin as four-di-

mensional perceivers. Children register the "events" of their envi-

ronment, rather than all the static "appearances" of objects. Later

they become three-dimensional perceivers, detecting the shapes of

objects. Still later they become capable of two-dimensional

perception, capable of registering flat shapes or, information

provided by marks on flat surfaces. This Japanese view developed

quite independently of Bower's work. Yet there is a fascinating

parallel between Bower's findings and Nakagawa's theory. The

crowning touch is that Bower finds that very young infants will not

accept a static object as being equivalent to the same object in

motion. An infant following a moving object with his eyes will not

continue to look at the object when it comes to rest. Instead, he will

continue his tracking motion briefly after the object stops, and then

look around, for all the world as though he were trying to find a

missing object. The stationary object is not "recognized," Bower

speculates, as the heir to the moving object (Bower, 1971).Nakagawa's ideas together with Bower's research suggest a

three-step sequence: first, the young infant registers objects in

motion and fails to connect a stationary object with the same object

in motion. Second, the child recognizes objects that are static, like

Bower's cubes, but not when depicted. Third, the infant, in a steadily

maturing development of a capacity to recognize the same object in

many guises, comes to recognize pictorial information, static

information, and motion-carried information as being equivalent.General theories have a way of being vague and consequently

difficult to test. They also have a way of meeting a slow death in the

hands of experimental fact. For good reasons, therefore, the

Nakagawa theory is offered at the end of my description of

experiments. The best spirit in which to take the theory, at this point,

is that it is fascinating speculation, a conceivable and imaginative

interpretation of the facts, a theory that contrasts with the alternative

theory that children have to be taught, piecemeal, a set of pictorial

conventions.


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Chapter Five

Picture Perception

Across Cultures

andSpecies

The picture, particularly one

printed on paper," according to Biesheuvel (1949), "is a highly

conventional symbol, which the child reared in Western cultures haslearned to interpret" (p. 98), and the orthodoxy still holds that

unsophisticated subjects are puzzled by even clear photographs. "A

Bush Negro woman," Herskovits wrote (1948), "turned a photo-

graph this way and that, in attempting to make sense out of the

shadings of grey on the piece of paper she held" (p. 381). Some ob-

servers say that nonpictorial peoples find pictures mere daubs. "The

natives are frequently quite incapable of seeing pictures at first, and

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and even see comparable ambiguities in pictures Different cultures


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and even see comparable ambiguities in pictures. Different cultures

favor different interpretations of ambiguous drawings or comment

in different ways on the significance of frozen postures.

The hypothesis that pictures require training in a convention

seems even less likely when it becomes evident that lowly pigeons

and monkeys, both, seem capable of picture perception, with no

training, or the minimum of training that may be required to ac-

quaint them with the testing procedure.


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Chapter Six

Figure and

Ground

We see things because light fromthe surfaces pf things reaches our eye. Surfaces structure light by

various means, notably by being colored differently in different

areas. Where two differently colored areas are adjacent to one

another, the division between the two is called a contour.

Contours are considered very important to perception. They

are often supposed to be the basis of the perception of shape, via a

visual mechanism that results in the appearance of a clear figure

against a vaguer background or ground. Figure and ground can also

result from drawn lines-by a line I mean two contours close

together, enclosing a narrow strip of pigment--which makes figure

and ground a more general phenomenon, and also makes lines use-

ful tools for exploring figure and ground.

The originator of the concepts of figure and ground was

Edgar Rubin, a Dane. Despite the acclaim accorded his work, today

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The Scope of Outline Pictures 123122 A Psychology of Picture Perception

figures. An illustration in which all three attributes have been altered

is Fig. 31, which shows erect solid figures, men complete with

internal detail. Compared to Fig. 30, attributes (a), (b), and (c) have


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been changed in Fig. 31. In Fig. 32, only (a) and (b) are changed.

Nine subjects (summer school students at Cornell) wereshown Figs. 30, 31, and 32. They were simply asked to comment on

the things pictured. Eight of the nine identified the shadows in Fig.

30. All nine identified the figures in Fig. 31 as being men standing

in a row and did not mention shadows. No subject mentioned shad-

ows for Fig. 32, seven of the subjects saying the figures were supine

men. Two thought the men were strangely flattened--"cutouts,"

said one; "flattened," said the other.

When internal detail was added, but the flatness (or con-currence with a single plane) retained, subjects often commented on

the flatness of the figures, saying for Fig. 33 that there was an

impression of figures "painted on the ground" or "totally flat" or

"flat. and unreal." Again, no one mentioned shadows. However,

when the internal detail was removed, as in Fig. 34, even if the

outline was for a rounder, fuller figure, six out of nine subjects still

mentioned shadows. The information for the solid silhouette of a

man was not preventing subjects from using the lack of internaldetail and location of the figures as information for a shadow.

Could the kind of difference between Fig. 30 and Fig. 34 be

used by subjects? Perhaps the subjects were simply using lax criteria

for fonn, assuming that the drawings are made roughly with no great

emphasis on niceties of form. If so, subjects could be asked to

compare two drawings including the kinds of difference

distinguishing Fig. 30 and 34. Two extra drawings of vertical fig-

ures, different only in outline information for fullness or solidity(Fig. 35 and Fig. 36), were shown to all nine subjects. They were

asked to say which looked more "bulky" and which looked more

"flat." All nine subjects chose correctly--Fig. 35 was said to be more

"bulky."

It seems that absence of internal detail, concurrence with

surface, and flatness are distinguishing features of shadows. These

aid subjects in recognizing outline depiction of shadows. Informa-

Fig. 32

FIGURE 31. The foreground figures are solid, detailed, and erect.

FIGURE 32. The supine figures are solid and detailed.

124 A Psychology of Picture Perception The Scope of Outline Pictures 125


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Fig. 33 Fig. 35

Fig. 36

Fig. 34

FIGURE 33. The supine figures are flat and detailed.

FIGURE 34. The information for solidity--rather than flatshadows in the supine figures is often not detected.

FIGURE 35. The erect figures contain information forroundness or bulkiness.

FIGURE 36. The erect figures contain information for flatness,unlike these in Figure 35.


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Using the language of Lines 149


with surfaces on one side and air space in between. Here is the heart

of the paradox. In a violation of nature, what was surface has

become air space. Similarly, the innermost lines depict occluding

bounds at one end (enclosing surface) and occluding bounds at the


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other end (enclosing air space). The direction of occlusion has

reversed, from one end of the line to the other, so that surface and

air space have interchanged.

Fig. 55

FIGURE 54. In reality, a wire cannot become an edge, as itdoes here.

The fork is impossible because of the kinds of changes de-

picted. What is impossible is that a boundary between surface and

air should reverse so that air is on the same side of a boundary as a

surface. The direction of occlusion, in nature, cannot reverse as it

does in the innermost pair of lines of the fork, and occlusion cannotappear where previously there was a convex comer, as in the middle

pair of lines.

Similarly, a wire (air on both sides) cannot turn into an

occluding edge (air on one side), as in Fig. 54. Surface cannot

simply cease to exist, as it does in Fig. 55 (after Josef Albers). Nor

can a crack (surface on both sides) turn into edges or wires (air on

one or both sides), as in Fig. 56 (after Lochlan Magee). None of

these paradoxical figures could be cut from fiat sheets (solid sur-faces), for the rules of solidity are violated, though all of these fig-

ures can be drawn with lines or made from wires. It is as depictions

of surfaces with edges that they show impossible objects. In lan-

guage, the rule sounds as implausible as the objects look--"passing

from surface to air we find ourselves passing from air to surface."

In impossibles, each part is ecological, but the combination

of the parts violates nature. They could not exist, so they are imag-

inary, but the fact that they are imaginary does not make them im-

Fig. 56

FIGURE 55. In this anomalous drawing, surfaces areinitiated but not terminated.

FIGURE 56. In reality, a crack cannot become an edge or awire, as here.


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152 A Psychology of Picture Perception Using the Language of Lines 153


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FIGURE 58. Figures containing overlap or projectivedistortions ("projections"), drawn as raised lines on plasticsheets.

(twice), the table (twice), and the face (once). Interestingly, there is

no hint that plane imprints are easier than projective forms, for an

equal number of imprints and projections were identified (five

each). In later testing, four high-school blind subjects identified two

or three displays each, usually the cup, table, and hand, but once

including the flag and once including the man with his arms

crossed. Evidently, lines depicting boundaries of surfaces,

sometimes with background behind occluding edges and bounds,

seem appropriate to some blind subjects.

The failure to pick out the correct label for the form does not

mean the lines are meaningless, for the kinds of errors subjects

made were curiously appropriate. Subjects misidentified the fork as

an arm and a hand, which almost fits the display to vision. Equally

reasonable to vision was misidentifying the fork as a tulip with a

thick stem, as "an ice-cream cone with an unusual bottom," or as a

bell on a kind of chain. Similarly reasonable are misidentification of

FIGURE 57. Figures not containing overlap or projectivedistortions ("imprints"). These figures were drawn as raisedlines on plastic sheets and were explored by touch by blindand blindfolded subjects.

like a circular cup projecting an elliptical brim and a table projecting

a parallelogram. If occluding edges and bounds, with background,

mean little to the blind, projections should be difficult to identify.

Some subjects did not identify any of the eight displays, andsome identified half. Two of the subjects identified four displays

each (five each, if calling a cup a "container" or first labeling the

fork correctly, and then retracting the name, are considered accept-

able). Two identified one display each. Four identified no displays.

The occasional successes suggest some untutored links be-

tween lines and solid forms, in touch. The displays that were recog-

nized included the hand (three times), the fork (twice), the cup


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john m. kennedy - a psychology of picture perception

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